Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State

By Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State offers a New World rejoinder to the largely Europe-centered academic discourse on church and state. In contrast to what is often assumed, in the Americas the relationship between church and state has not been one of freedom or separation but one of unstable and adaptable collusion. Ekklesia sees in the settler states of North and South America alternative patterns of conjoined religious and political power, patterns resulting from the undertow of other gods, other peoples, and other claims to sovereignty. These local challenges have led to a continuously contested attempt to realize a church-minded state, a state-minded church, and the systems that develop in their concert. The shifting borders of their separation and the episodic conjoining of church and state took new forms in both theory and practice.
The first of a closely linked trio of essays is by Paul Johnson, and offers a new interpretation of the Brazilian community gathered at Canudos and its massacre in 1896–97, carried out as a joint churchstate mission and spectacle. In the second essay, Pamela Klassen argues that the colonial churchstate relationship of Canada came into being through local and national practices that emerged as Indigenous nations responded to and resisted becoming “possessions” of colonial British America. Finally, Winnifred Sullivan’s essay begins with reflection on the increased effort within the United States to ban Bibles and scriptural references from death penalty courtrooms and jury rooms; she follows with a consideration of the political theological pressure thereby placed on the jury that decides between life and death. Through these three inquiries, Ekklesia takes up the familiar topos of “church and state” in order to render it strange.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226545615

Book preview

EKKLESIA

Each TRIOS book addresses an important theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.

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The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology

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EKKLESIA

THREE INQUIRIES IN CHURCH AND STATE

Paul Christopher Johnson

Pamela E. Klassen

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54544-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54558-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-54561-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226545615.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Container of (work): Johnson, Paul C. (Paul Christopher), 1964– People and the law of the hound at Canudos. | Container of (work): Klassen, Pamela E. (Pamela Edith), 1967– Spiritual jurisdictions. | Container of (work): Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, 1950– Banning bibles.

Title: Ekklesia : three inquiries in church and state / Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan.

Other titles: Trios (Chicago, Ill.)

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Series: Trios | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028653 | ISBN 9780226545448 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226545585 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226545615 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Church and state—Brazil. | Church and state—Canada. | Church and state—United States.

Classification: LCC BR500 .E35 2018 | DDC 322/.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028653

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Introduction

Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

THE PEOPLE AND THE LAW OF THE HOUND AT CANUDOS

Paul Christopher Johnson

SPIRITUAL JURISDICTIONS  Treaty People and the Queen of Canada

Pamela E. Klassen

BANNING BIBLES  Death-Qualifying a Jury

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

William Edmondson, Church Lady (1933/37). Limestone, 49.5 × 20 × 20 cm. Through prior acquisition of the George F. Harding Collection (2014.4). Art Institute of Chicago. Photograph: Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New York.

INTRODUCTION

Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

The inaugural issue of the Journal of Church and State in 1959 began by citing the grand claim of the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner: The relation between Church and State is the greatest subject in the history of the West.¹ Today, more than fifty years later, these capitalized rubrics seem less discrete and their relations less self-evidently important, while also seeming oddly unavoidable. What other words are there? As a great subject, the Christian particularity of the pairing of church and state has been both obvious and misrecognized, much in the same way that the word religion often connotes a universality that obscures its Christian template. Resisting Brunner’s triumphalism, as well as any position that views church and state as naturally occurring institutions, we nevertheless begin with several basic assumptions: we agree that attending to church and state remains necessary; we believe each to be both inescapable and radically contingent; and finally, we regard the two as necessarily entangled. We intervene to offer new perspectives from the Americas on these issues.²

We investigate this constellation of issues under the rubric ekklesia. Ekklesia bears an etymology stemming from both ancient Athenian citizen assemblies and, later, early Christian churches; each was a local congregation gathered in the name either of the polis or the body of Christ, of the demos or of God. In each case ekklesia implied exclusion, having profound effects on those not understood to be similarly collected: slaves, women, pagans, Jews. Jean-Luc Nancy notes that the word ekklesia was drawn from or gestured to institutions of the Greek city yet marked the birth of a new mode of assembly distinct from the social or political, in that sense signaling at once the twin origin and essential separation of church and state.³ It is the tension between the two clauses drawn from and essential separation that attracts our attention and that we seek to hold in focus. That ekklesia shares roots in the two kinds of assemblies that furnish the origins of state and church in Western imaginations and political theory—namely the Greek city-state and the early Christian church—and yet persists in wildly different settings provokes our reflections in this book. We give attention both to the attempted separation of religion and politics, church and state—their essential separation—and to the richly diverse failures of such an attempt, the ways one form draws from the other. These essays foreground the infiltrations of religion, especially in Christian forms, into legal and political spheres too easily read as solely matters of state as well as the always present effect of the legal and the political in matters of religion.

THINKING THROUGH CHURCHSTATENESS

The state has been often described and theorized, but the church less so, at least beyond ecclesiastical contexts too indebted perhaps to its sense as given. The phenomenon of their often enmeshed and intercalibrated forms—a crossed and intertextual churchstateness—requires more detached and empirically grounded description and conceptualization. This volume returns to the old saw of church and state to render it strange and to specify the niches in which New World redactions of churchstateness have struggled to be realized. We seek to underline the persistent hybridity, mutuality, and yet incompleteness of Christian, colonial, and state power in the Americas. Old World and preconquest forms of jurisdiction haunt the phenomenon of churchstateness: enabled in distinctive ways by the brutishness of the Atlantic passage and challenged by indigenous laws and visions of authority, the claims of church and state in the Americas, as elsewhere, rest on foundational violence.

Insisting on being surprised anew by the odd persistence and irregularity of the patterns and powers of churchstateness in the Americas, we seek to intervene in academic conversations in religious studies, legal studies, history, anthropology, political science, and indigenous studies. We use ekklesia to open an inquiry into the ways collectives in the Americas have been forged from an ill-defined yet powerful churchstateness composed of the interpenetrating and mutually constitutive forces of religion, law, and politics. Christian ideas and motivations have played a fundamental role in generating these collectives, the body of Christ and the body politic together working to constitute the people as chosen, celebrated, and accorded the right to exercise will.

Church and state are analytical markers or pivots around which cluster distinct but overlapping techniques of convening the people.⁴ They name institutions and disciplinary conventions of converting human beings into self-conscious collectives capable of acting together. One might imagine—in the distinctive European American voice of political philosophy—that the first acts that generated the sense of being a collective might have arrived in public ceremonial form, acting and speaking together, as Hannah Arendt put it—triumphant songs; recitations; choreographed gestures of hand, head, arm or leg; wearied pilgrimages to sanctified sites.⁵ It would be difficult to specify whether these were religious or political, church or state. Who could say? They were both.

Judith Butler, building on Arendt, argues that the people continue to emerge through plural assembly that is performative and embodied. This corporeality, gathered together, Butler argues, can challenge reigning notions of the political precisely because of the willingness of people to exercise a plural and performative right to appear.⁶ For our purposes, the power of the people lies in its effectiveness as a metaphor of assembly that binds and excludes individuals and that makes and dissolves corporeality. Sometimes a challenge to the state, and sometimes required by the state, plural assembly is also embodied in the Christian obligation to congregate, together constituting the people.

Assemblies are characterized by mixed qualities of what we are provisionally calling churchness, stateness, and churchstateness. Ekklesia are, so to speak, convened under a transcendent sovereignty. As ekklesia, the people appear surrounded by a numinous haze, gathered over a sensibility of foundation rendered perceptible in ritual and authorized in law.⁷ As members of ekklesia, or groups with foundation authorized to act, individual persons are shaped into agents with transformative potential. Church and state are joined at the hip in the historical cultivation of many of the most obvious techniques of making such communities: the use of ritual and symbolic forms to transform masses of individuals into a body, the conversion of work and suffering into the civil terms of duty and virtue, the ceremonial assemblies of glory and acclamation that establish strata of rank and prestige, the activation of charity and caregiving, the fostering of distinct and overlapping subjectivities, and the economies of violent sacrifice through which abstract ideals like the nation and the faithful are made manifest in the flesh.

But just how are they joined at the hip? The familiar phrase, church and state, marks a codependence or symbiosis only poorly understood, perhaps particularly in its present uses. As an opening sally perhaps one might provisionally propose, even while insisting on the problems caused by such a separation of function, that churches rely on states for definition, protection, infrastructure, recognition, and financial or legal rights, while states take from the church the aesthetics of monumentality and permanence, the solemnity of legal-ritual formalities to grant legitimacy to governance and the transmission of power, and the time-weathered aura of tradition. In so doing, states gain and communicate a past and are made to appear as a natural inheritance accrued in sediments of time, history, territory, and blood.

Continuing with this rough profile, one might then note that at specific historical junctures, church and state collapse into each other to become virtual isomorphs. This course has been not infrequently recommended by classical political theorists, from positions as different as those presented in Rousseau’s fusion called civil religion and Hobbes’s politicoreligious Leviathan. Here one could name manifold historical examples, stretching the notion of church beyond its Christian referents: imperial cults from Rome to Japan and divine kings from Oyo (in today’s Nigeria) to Tenochtitlan, as well as other formations such as pre-Communist Tibet. The king’s authority was staged as descended from heaven, the queen’s touch deployed as the hand of God.

At other moments king and cleric drifted from the other’s sphere, as rival and combatant. There is usually an implicit inevitability to this genre of the story: even a pope like Gregory II, attired as feudal lord with castle, land, and army, could never fully become an earthly sovereign and had to astutely leverage one king against another to thrive. Of these cycles of approximation and distance—but mostly told today with a telos of the ultimate separation of political and religious spheres—every student of church history can recite examples. Historians of religions, stocked with comparative examples from outside the West, wait ready with more. But even to recite these stories is to belie their interested presumptions, excluding as they do the messiness of religious and political life, giving too much to the voices of the powers that be, too much distinctness to entities only ever imagined as separate. Who experienced such tidy stories?

Theorists questioning the relation of church and state frequently work on a comparative Atlantic axis, in which the question of the separation of church and state in the United States is juxtaposed with political histories in Europe and Great Britain.⁸ When naturalized, that is, when not recognized, this transatlantic juxtaposition can have the effect of converting a couple of parochial examples into a seemingly universally relevant historical juggernaut, as Emil Brunner would have had it. While clearly a conjunction that has profoundly shaped theories—and practices—of religion, politics, and secularity on both sides of the Atlantic, the twinning of church and state must also be investigated at a much more local scale, closer to the ground, through a consideration of the fuzziness of the borders and of the political wrangling that takes place in courts of law, via public discourse, and between bodies on land. Bringing together a local scale of analysis with a broader statewide and comparative approach is especially important for another necessary denaturalization of church and state, one that reveals how the sovereignty of colonial nation-states has been premised on labor-intensive rituals, laws, and acts of legal violence, to take Walter Benjamin’s phrase, often legitimated in the name of a Christian God.⁹

In other words, in many cases church and state conjures a mutually consolidated system of rule, a closed system of vertically integrated institutional power over a certain territory, whose long narrative we all know and understand only too well. It can be traced back to the Constantinian revolution and forward through to the emergence of the early modern nation-states of Europe, the fascist governments of the twentieth century, and the security states of the twenty-first. The texts of this narrative include Augustine, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Gramsci, Schmitt, and Agamben as well as those of Bhabha, Fanon, and Said, postcolonial critics of the modern state and of its only too complicit partner, Christianity. Church and state in this reading are symbiotically joined twins, to a degree even made in each other’s image. One completes or stands in for the other, supplying missing or fading powers as needed. In the secularization version of this way of thinking, the church declines in northern Europe when the state assumes the church’s previous functions such as social welfare, marriage, and education. In countries like Syria, Egypt or Nigeria, conversely, the state is read as weakened because religious movements (which, insisting on troubling the power of the received story, we are naming the church even though these movements are not all Christian) have assumed powers previously granted to the state, such as the legitimate right to violence. For example, outside observers often express concern about the effects of Orthodox Jewish leaders on the state in Israel. The point is that the rise or fall of church or state is presented as always corollary to, or even a function of, the opposing movement of the other, as though in a zero-sum game or a controlled vacuum.

This book tells a different story. We see stateness and churchness as analytically distinct but as, in practice, also an interlocking series of documents, procedures, practices, discursive registers, buildings, uniforms, lawlike rules, sounds, and ways of seeing.¹⁰ Churchstateness designates partly isomorphic patterns of materials, practices, and procedures that join only apparently discrete domains. Specific historical cases reveal distinct calibrations of hybrid churchstateness. Noah Shusterman, riffing on James Scott, used the phrase seeing like a church to describe how the revolutionary French regime replicated church actions in its regulation of holidays, the calendar, and the proper use of time.¹¹ States might likewise be understood to see like a church when legal courts begin to cast themselves as experts on religious authenticity.¹² State and religion became entwined, paradoxically, with liberal and secular reform—as transpired in Brazil in 1890, in India beginning in 1955, in the United States during the civil rights movement, or in South Africa after 1994. Moving in the other direction, the church might be seen to see like a state when it seeks to undercut what James Scott called metis, or local cunning, to universalize its own influence.¹³ Yet such seeings also reproduce a distinction that this volume resists. As both a conceptual and a historical tangle, the rubric churchstateness points to a scrum of fictions about authorizing presence and foundations for intervention.

THE PEOPLE

The wide-angle frame has been helpful to track patterns of governance from the foundation of the sacred king to, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a foundation from which to build the sacred people. While some have pushed the time frame earlier,¹⁴ the more familiar tale perhaps is that the new assemblage called the people was born between the time of Rousseau’s Social Contract (1760) and the end of the long Age of Revolution, extending to around 1840. In the context of the American Revolution, for example, the people starred equally in pamphlets by conservative writers like Edmund Burke and revolutionaries like Thomas Paine. The king was dead as inheritor and benefactor who, through his bodily person, anchored the power of right. The new foundation, whether of law, contract, or social bond, was the more abstract people.

The people in a modern sense, then, came into being in the eighteenth century through discourses, most prominently in claims of (putatively) universal human rights that appear in England’s Charter, the United States’ Bill of Rights, France’s Revolutionary Constitution, Poland’s May 3 Constitution of 1791, Haiti’s revolution from 1791 to its 1804 Declaration of Independence, and declarations of independence in formerly Spanish America from 1811 (Venezuela) to 1831 (Colombia), to name only a few. Claims to authority predicated on divine providence from beyond the terrestrial hum continued in force, not least in antislavery documents and in slave rebellions from Nat Turner’s in the United States (1831) to the largest Brazilian slave rebellion, carried out mostly by Muslim Hausa in Bahia (1835). And the treaties signed between Indigenous nations and the British and Americans depended on sacralized authority on both sides of the agreements. Despite the religious ideals invoked during this long Age of Revolution, the power of providential claims of God-given rights hung on the degree to which they were yoked to an enforcing state and national body of citizens. This latter term signals how the people were always, in practice if not in ideal, distinguished from people, the faceless multitude in the distance beyond recognized authenticity or legal right.

Nothing in this is very original, at least not among philosophers of political theology who have given the closest scrutiny to the story of the transfer of foundational power from the king to the people. Scholars from Carl Schmitt and Ernst Kantorowicz to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Eric Santner, and Claude Lefort have all observed that the entity called the people is possessed of key contradictions. Lefort, for example, pointed out the contradiction between the people as the proletariat versus the people as the nation and the way that the people, in the moment of reifying a social bond simultaneously abstracts it into a plurality of atoms, a statistic.¹⁵ The Anglo tradition’s emphasis on the term’s reference to specific individuals and their rights stands in some contrast to the French tilt toward collectivist formulations of the people, or the nineteenth-century German idealization of Volk. Even more fundamental is the fracture between inclusion and exclusion, between democratic extension and its specified limit. The people are surrounded by other people. In that sense, the people is an ideal that is also a boundary splitting center from periphery; it indexes at once a given citizenry and an encompassing sea of only potential people, and non-people who wait amassed beyond a given frontier—selectively given the freedom to enter, or banned altogether.¹⁶ These latter are invalid, illegitimate, juridically disempowered noncitizens, sometimes thought of as subjects, most often distinguished by their gender, race, class, or religion.¹⁷ They are simply not, as Hegel had it, in history. Thinkers including Schmitt, Hacking, and Santner examined the biopolitical management of the bifurcations of People/people as a social and political form.

These thinkers also thought they saw a historical process through which the gap between the king’s two bodies, between his flesh-and-blood form and his immortal, sovereign one, as Kantorowicz detailed—and the enormous labor expended on making those bodies cohere—was transferred to a new body in a kind of ontological rupture. The new rupture was between people and the people, calling forth efforts to bridge and justify the chasm separating actual human bodies from the social and even transcendent ideal of the people. To this end, Agamben outlined a dual genealogy that juxtaposed terms like demos—the citizens—in contradistinction to bare-life urbs and plebs, the multitude, the massa, the ochlos.¹⁸ Even more, he described how religion offers one way that people are converted into the people, via the ekklesia, bodies joined in liturgies of glorious acclamation.¹⁹

Political theologians have taken great care in conceptualizing the shift from one form of gap to another. Still, to play the gnat in the ears of giants for a moment, the on-the-ground work of discerning, archiving, and analyzing processes of this great shift from the problematic of the king, or queen, to that of the people, has been taken up with less urgency. Insofar as that processual work has been undertaken, moreover, it yields suggestive if opaque leads. When Santner asserts that the king’s two bodies "morph into the person-office opposition, or it [a structural interregnum or void] passed from the court and into the heart of the People, or that juridical speech comes to replace" liturgical speech as the locus of magic, new questions are posed.²⁰ How might we move closer to, or even explore the inner recesses of, these transitional verbs and phrases like morph, pass into, or come to replace" in order to better view their cogs and tunings, their stutters and gaps? They are anything but self-evident; they are certainly not completed.

THE AMERICAS

Any guise of self-evidence or the obvious in the frame of church and state rests in the fact that the thrust of the political-theological story, at least from the vantage point of the Americas, has been mostly too captive to Europe.²¹ Perhaps we could say with only a little exaggeration that the Americas, when they appear in works of contemporary political theology, serve mostly as utopic horizon in the vein of Locke’s famous phrase In the beginning, all the world was America, with but little thereafter on the consequences of the Americas’ colonial interpellation as a place imagined to mimic Europe’s beginning.²² So, for example, Locke’s philosophical New World utopia masks his own part in the dispossession of Indigenous nations and in instituting slavery in the Americas as legal right.²³ Almost two centuries later, Tocqueville’s descriptions are still comically romantic: In America, the principle of the sovereignty of the people is not either barren or concealed, as it is with some other nations; it is recognised by the customs and proclaimed by laws; it spreads freely, and arrives without impediment at its most remote consequences.²⁴ In Tocqueville’s America the air is wholesome and the forests primeval. Slavery appears but mostly painted with a light brush and pastel hue, even in chapter 5, How Democracy Affects the Relations of Master and Servants. And Tocqueville was hardly alone in looking past slavery while contemplating the people.

Hegel too utterly effaced actual slaves and their revolution in Saint-Domingue / Haiti from his famous passage on the dialectic of the master and the slave in Phenomenology of Spirit, as Susan Buck-Morss shows.²⁵ This was so even though he worked on the passage from 1803 to 1805 in Jena, every day reading the newspaper, calling it his morning prayer.²⁶ The news in his morning prayers covered the revolution in France’s most prosperous colony, the loss of some fifty thousand of Napoleon’s troops, and Haiti’s declaration of independence by a former slave, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in 1804. Surely Buck-Morss is correct, then, to say that Hegel configured the master-slave dialectic (and probably also his idea of Volksgeist, the spirit of the people that moves toward unity with the state through religion), in part through a reading of the Americas that insistently misrecognized it